A Fascination With His Teenage Years

Brisbane collective We All Want To have been around long enough now to have already left a substantial mark on the scene — their second album, 2012’s Come Up Invisible, for instance, was both nominated for Album Of The Year at the Queensland Music Awards and made the AMP longlist — yet it’s beyond question that their brand new and third long-player, The Haze, is the most perfect distillation thus far of the band’s sun-kissed pop aesthetic. The pristine sound was courtesy of the band’s erstwhile guitarist Darek Mudge, who recorded the album at his studio The Shed, although despite the stellar results the sessions didn’t pass completely without incident.

“I’m really happy with it,” offers frontman Tim Steward. “It was a weird one to record, because Darek really took on the production role and he kind of went really hard — he went that extra mile — and he really directed us and helped out with the arrangements, to the point where with me being the total freak I was going, ‘Wow, this is hard for me to take onboard!’

"You might meet someone at a party one night who you end up spending ten years of your life with."

“It was a tough session, but in retrospect you understand why — to make the album we’ve got, he had to get the very best he could from every single take and every single member. We hired him as the producer and that’s the job he stepped up for and did.”

Steward wrote the bulk of The Haze, and was thus the chief architect of the album’s loose narrative about that nebulous time in one’s life where the frivolity of childhood has passed but the responsibilities of adulthood aren’t yet a burden, and anything seems possible.

“Most of my songs were written in a very short period — I just had a couple of loose ideas and they just manifested and grew a little,” Steward explains. “There’s this whole process during your teens and twenties where you fall in love all the time, and you meet loads of people and you’re going to parties, and you might meet someone at a party one night who you end up spending ten years of your life with. These really, really random connections happen and they resound and the ripples go out far and wide into your group of friends and your family.” 

“And also I can’t pretend to be a teenager and write from that angle anymore, I’ve just got to be honest and write songs as an older guy looking back on the lifestyle changes through your twenties and thirties and stuff like that. It’s just really interesting to me — it’s fascinating to look back and see how people’s lives changed from what they did in their twenties that might have seemed inconsequential at the time. It’s definitely not pining for the past, it’s more a fascination.”